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"If you're trying to change your world, think
big" must have been the Reverend George Lee's mantra
in the Mississippi Delta region during the Jim Crow days of the
early 1950s. And if you were thinking big in the
Mississippi Delta in the 1950s and you were a black man, you were
definitely trying to become the first martyr of the Civil Rights
Movement. Reverend Lee looms in history due to that
thinking as he ended up being that first martyr!
Reverend Lee was a
multi-talented individual who owned a printing business, pastored
his flock at a Baptist church, participated actively in the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and gave
civil rights speeches advocating changes in his area of Belzoni,
Mississippi.
In 1999, I journeyed to Belzoni
while in the Mississippi Delta to pay my respects to this
American hero. While the community erected a
memorial marker a few blocks away and named a street after him,
unfortunately, they did not tell his whole story. I was so
disappointed as it seemed like only part of the history was being
told. Here are the missing pieces...
...If change scares some
people, the Reverend Lee must have terrified more than
a few with his ideas on civil rights including his boldest
initiative--registering African-Americans to vote so they could
elect one of their own as the area's United States
Congressman. In 1954, the year before his death, Reverend Lee
worked with his friend Gus Courts, the local NAACP chapter
president, to register African-American voters. This act of
brazen indifference to the Jim Crow atmosphere, registering 92 new
African-American voters, created a personal, yet public backlash to
the Reverend in the late Spring of 1955. While at the wheel of
his car driving down a Belzoni, he was overtaken by a car
full of white assassins who fired a gun into his
vehicle. Reverend Lee was struck in the face, but
died nearly immediately before any medical professionals could
help him. No one was ever held responsible for this
assassination.
A block or so away is
Reverend Lee's church. It took me a while to roam up and down
the lines of graves in the Green Grover Missionary Baptist Church's
cemetery to find the Reverend's grave.
The wind-blown memorial
flowers, long since faded, were laying on their side, so I
straightened them up at his headstone. As I stood in front of
his tombstone, evidently mounted
on a seven foot by four foot by 4 inch cement covering designed to
protect the grave from vandals, I thought, "Here is a real hero
who died in combat in the war for equality." Knowing the
people who killed him escaped, like the cowards they were,
accountability for their actions, I leaned my civil rights history
guidebook against his marker and said, " Well, Reverend, look
how far we've come."
For more information on Reverend Lee,
please see these excellent web pages:
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